The Marie Skłodowska Curie Action (MSCA) Individual Fellowship “Residue and Materials analyses of Early Iron Age ceramics, KwaZulu-Natal” (RAMEKIN), hosted at LMU Munich and FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, investigated the subsistence practices of ancient black farming communities (c. 300-1000 A.D.) during their southernmost expansion across Africa, in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa. It has long been thought that these agricultural pioneers first entered the region from southern Mozambique, cutting back the original dense coastal forests to plant crops and to prepare grazing lands for the extensive cattle herds that were preeminent amongst later southern African farming communities. The location of the earliest sites near to the shore, and evidence for marine shellfish harvesting suggest that these groups may have relied extensively on wild coastal resources. However, extremely limited archaeological prospection in the region, and poor recovery of faunal and plant remains means that little is certain about the livelihoods of these earliest groups and hypotheses about relative contributions of wild/ domestic or marine/ terrestrial foods have yet to be tested with dated archaeological material.
RAMEKIN set out to evaluate two broadly contradictory hypotheses about the nature of early farmer’s subsistence. The more widely accepted posits that the earliest farmers brought cattle with them to the region, accepting that cattle, highly valued amongst both modern and historical black African farming communities, were similarly economically and ideologically important to the earliest pioneer farmers. An alternative interpretation of the record notes the limited evidence for cattle bones in ancient sites, and instead suggests that the pioneer groups organised their economies and social arrangements differently, and cattle had no special pre-eminence at this time. Further, some evidence for the use of marine resources such as shellfish suggests that early communities may have been dependant on the sea – this situation contrasts markedly with more recent groups in this region for whom marine resource usage is extremely small scale.
